>It's been years since I last saw any part of the BC, and the parts I >do remember are mostly associated with Bob's DWII, so I might >be wrong in my recollections but isn't their some cultural or possible >technical taboo about cybernetics?

I haven't seen much evidence of same in my recent poke through the DVD set. Then again, there's not much evidence of cybernetics in BGC in the first place. Oh, sure, in AD Police Files there was the freaktastic Robocop guy everybody was afraid of, but that was AD Police Files. Its view of the BGC universe is only a couple of steps removed from the world of SCUD: The Disposable Assassin. :)

The Iron Age universe is kind of its own thing in that regard, I guess. It's got a little bit of both BGC universes in it, and the rest, pretty much by default, had to be invented in-house.

>Are people going to be freaked out >by ol' Doc MegaZone and his black bag or is it more of a "the Japanese >hate/fear cyber but everyone else, ehhh not so much?"

Well, those who know about it think it's kind of weird that he likes to test his inventions himself, and he's definitely more wired than your average citizen, but at the same time, he's not obvious about it unless he's doing something. He's not one of these ostentatious kromeboiz who sits around polishing his bio-armor.

Anyway, no, there isn't a big cultural bias against cybernetic augmentation. Some people don't want to get it themselves, for various reasons - because of the cost, the maintenance requirements, it's just not their cup of tea - but most don't really have a problem with it in other people, especially if there's some indication that it was necessary. For example, neuroprocessors are gaining in popularity because they're very useful, but people have security concerns about them and they're the kind of specialized technology that the man on the street has no real use for in the first place.

Having a limb replacement because you were in a car crash isn't a big deal. Having one because you had a perfectly good arm cut off and replaced with a cybernetic one, and then making a big deal out of it in public, will get you thought of as a big time freak, but that has more to do with the "deliberate mutilation" part of the picture.

>This is the first time I've ever seen the 2040 Nene, and in all >honesty I have no idea how I feel about the new look. I don't feel >apathy, which I guess is a good thing, but it'll take some getting >used to for my mind to "see" her when I read. I will say that I do >like the fact that the blond is a realistic sandy color instead of >something out of a 1st graders Crayola box.

I have to admit it's not the best picture of her, but it was getting late and I didn't want to take the time to go get my DVD set and get some decent screencaps.

Anyway, here's the thing about Nene: unlike, say, Sylia (who has markedly different personalities in the two versions, but one of them is irritating as shit), Linna (who has pretty much no personality in the original, and whose 2040 characterization doesn't fit the TIA story because it's pretty well bound up in the 2040 plot itself), or Priss (who is, conversely, kind of a cipher in 2040), both versions of Nene are a lot of fun to me, but they manage it in different ways. I didn't know which one I was going to go with until midway through production on issue #1, at which point the way a particular scene I was working on broke down pretty much made the call for me.

If you want to stretch a metaphor, they both got to audition, and for this particular storyline, the more, uh... peppery version won. 2032 Nene is still one of my favorite characters, and the fact that she was passed over for Iron Age isn't supposed to be some kind of snub or partisan thing, so I hope it's not taken that way by any of y'all out there.

As for those of you who are big 2032 partisans, I'll just ask you to give her a shot. Maybe you'll like her better separated from most of her original context. It's worked before.

And don't despair; this doesn't necessarily mean that redheaded Nene will never work for EPU again...

>Am I the only one who thinks Daley should be teaching English Lit 101?